Aid and Development: Issues and Reflections

The paper has three main sections. The first is a review of two particular propositions which appear in Dambisa Moyo’s 2009 book Dead Aid which were not subjected to rigorous analysis in the reviews which appeared following its publication. The finding is that neither proposition survives serious scrutiny – that aid is responsible for most of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic woes and that the international bond market represents a viable alternative to foreign aid for the finance of development-oriented investment. The second questions some of the characteristics and uses of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), particularly focussing on the use of an essentially ordinal measure in cardinal applications. The third subjects the UK Department for International Development’s Needs-Effectiveness Index to critical review, concluding that further consideration of its attributes is necessary.

International Aid to Tanzania – with some comparisons from Ghana and Uganda

This paper has three principal objectives. First, to review the level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to Tanzania over the last two to three decades, and to place this into an economic context. This review includes some comparisons with the experience of Ghana and Uganda. Second, to discuss three major issues for the Tanzanian aid: the position of ODA as budget support, corruption, and alignment with the principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Third, to review the literature on the Tanzanian aid experience, including a range of official evaluation reports produced by the Tanzanian government and by the donor community. The conclusions, broadly, are that ODA has been at a sustained high level for most of the period reviewed, funding a significant amount of government development expenditure, and that economic growth has been strong, with poverty reduction ‘flat-lining’ in Tanzania but being significant in Ghana and Uganda. Experience with budget support in Tanzania has been mixed, corruption continues as a major concern, and improvements to public finance management have been difficult to achieve. In this context governance adjustments come slowly, requiring patience on the part of both recipient governments and the ODA donor community.